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Early last month, Google began implementing a big move in its ranking algorithm and establishing new datacenter infrastructures : BigDaddy was born.

Matt Cutts, head of anti-spam group at Google, has published information about BidDaddy on its blog:

• Bigdaddy on the move [2]
• Feedback on Bigdaddy data center [3]

Many think that BigDaddy means there will be big changes [4] in the Google result pages, and you should take it into consideration from a SEO [5] point of vue.

Matt Cutts posted three SEO advices just before its bigdaddy post, so they are possibly related to the Google algorithm change: they were about url canonicalization [6], interpreting inurl [7] and 302 redirects [8]. Those redirects are used to manipulate the Google rankings. So, I imagine Google tried hard to fix related issues. But informations about Google ranking algorithm are really kept secret.

Google is incorporating user feedback (most notably feedback about webspams [13]) for its BidDaddy upgrade. So things continue to evolve. But are the Google changes really important ? I beleive they are.

In my own little testing indeed, I saw that results on bigdaddy Google datacenter and on non-bigdaddy Google datacenters was sometimes very important (75% drop on a search like "publicityweb blog"). Some users are reporting something like a 700% drop in their Google ranking. And those are not related to 302-redirect/black-hat hacks to manipulate the Google index. Here one example of a (PR-5) webmaster losing ranks in Google [14]. Is this called "collateral damages"?

How could you watch what's going out ? You can try to query the different Google datacenters, using their different IP [15] addresses. Or you can use Tony Hill's BigDaddy watch service [16], by example. Nice work, Tony :-)

Let's hope that BigDaddy will improve the quality of the Google index, without causing too much damage to "honnest" webmasters that respect the Google SEO informations for webmasters [17] and other accessibility guidelines.

Do you have more informations about Google BigDaddy ? Don't hesitate to post them on this blog. Just create a nickname [18] and go!

Refs

• Matt Cutts blog [19]:
• Feedback on Bigdaddy data center [20]
• Bigdaddy on the move [21]
• SEO Advices about url canonicalization [22], interpreting inurl [23] and 302 redirects [24].
• Bigdaddy progress update [25]
• Google [26]:
• Google SEO informations for webmasters [27]
• web spam report [28]
  
• Tony Hill's BigDaddy watch service [29]
• DirectMag [30]: BigDaddy means there will be big changes [31]
• SEWatch forum [32]: a (PR-5) webmaster losing ranks in Google [33]